Scott Wolter made a big deal out of an alleged hand gesture he believes symbolizes membership in the cult of Mary Magdalene and the “monotheistic dualism” that celebrates the sacred feminine and venerates the genetic descendants of Jesus. This hand gesture, which is really nothing more than the natural position of a relaxed and extended hand, forms what Wolter sees as an “M” as seen in this painting of Christopher Columbus, a leading conspirator:

Columbus making the "Mary Magdalene" secret hand signal, according to Scott Wolter.

He also claims that both Oreo cookies and the flag of Canada are Templar symbols. Oreos, being black and white, symbolize the Templars’ black and white robes, while the Canadian flag, being red and white, symbolizes the Templars’ red cross on a white background. Both also encode the number twelve, allegedly a mystical Templar astrological number. It’s never exactly clear whether Wolter means for us to celebrate the conspirators are enlightened cultists working toward full equality for women or for us to fear them as a shadowy elite willing to use genocide and war to suppress the truth about Mary Magdalene to preserve power for those few who know the truth. I imagine that’s because for Wolter the conspiracy is both, and neither. It’s whatever the conspiracy theorist needs it to be at any given time.

But I want to take this to its logical extreme. Let’s accept everything Scott Wolter claims about M-shaped hand gestures, Templar color symbolism, and so on at face value. If we do that, we can thus “prove” that Hitler was in on the conspiracy and that Neo-Nazis are thus the last descendants of Wolter’s Templar cult. While this may smack of an argumentum ad Hitlerum, because of the centrality of Nazis to alternative history, and Wolter’s own introduction of Nazi ethnology in his new book, I think this is an avenue that’s important to explore.

Note: Scott Wolter is not a Nazi sympathizer. This is my point. His illogical claims can be bent to any purpose with equally convincing results.

So let’s start.

We don’t need to go very far. Here is Adolf Hitler’s official portrait. Note that he is making the M-shaped hand gesture which Wolter identified in images of the current pope, of Christopher Columbus, and of Renaissance art as symbolizing membership in the cult of Mary Magdalene. And he also has a Templar-style Maltese cross (i.e. the Iron Cross) on his coat!

Now, what other flag contains red and white color symbolism? Or red and black color symbolism? Why, the flag of Prussia, later the flag of the German Empire, and legally the flag of Germany at the time of Hitler’s assumption of the chancellorship.

The Nazis replaced this flag only in 1935, when they added this one, which uses the same colors.

Now what of the circle in the center with the swastika? Why, this is obviously a code for an Oreo cookie Templar communion wafer since it is both black and white. The swastika is composed of 8 black rectangles forming four bent arms of a cross; the occult negative space between each arm forms 4 more rectangles in white, thus producing the “twelve primary constellations” of the Scott Wolter zodiac. Wolter also tells us that the color gold is associated with Egypt and is therefore added to indicate Mary Magdalene. What do we find on Adolf Hitler’s personal standard? Gold accents! Worse: The reverse of Hitler’s standard contains the Templars’ Maltese cross, which Wolter found on the Oreo cookie, proof positive that Hitler was in on the conspiracy.

But we can do better. According to Ken Anderson’s Hitler and the Occult, the Austrian Aryan supremacist Adolf Josef Lanz, who went by the name Lanz von Liebenfelz, founded a neo-pagan, anti-Semitic society called the New Templars in 1894, adopted the swastika as its emblem, and claimed that “Hitler is one of our pupils.” (Note: Historians believe Liebenfelz, who also claimed Lenin as his pupil, was a liar—but why should that stop us?) Further, several alternative historians like Trevor Ravenscroft report that Hitler proclaimed “an Order, the Brotherhood of the Templars around the Holy Grail of the pure blood.” Obviously this can be nothing other than Jesus blood, for Hitler’s theologians assured him Jesus was an Aryan, something many modern images of Jesus continue to depict, and Hitler lusted after the magical lance that pierced the side of Jesus. So now we have Hitler as a Templar worshiping the Holy Aryan Bloodline of Super-Jesus! This, of course, runs us up against more than one contradiction. First and most obviously, if the U.S. and Canada are run by the conspiracy, but so too is Hitler a member, why then did the two sides fight against each other in World War II? Was there a higher order conspiracy? A civil war in the sacred feminine movement? Once you open that door, it’s turtles all the way down. Futher, Hitler forbade Liebenfelz from publishing after the Anschluss and purged the New Templars and most other occult orders. Conspiracy theorists think he did this to preserve all the Templar magic for himself. Yet at the same time, Wolter believes that the Holy Bloodline conspiracy was inspired by Jews, who were the first to reach America and whose secrets the Templars learned from “technology” and “scrolls” beneath the Temple Mount. (His source, Ralph Ellis, believes the Jews faked the Resurrection.) And yet Hitler killed the Jews. Worse, Hitler believed that Freemasons were among the most dangerous groups in the world, dominated by Jews, conspiring with Bolsheviks, and undermining National Socialism, as he wrote in Mein Kampf: “in Freemasonry, which has succumbed to [the Jew] completely, he has an excellent instrument with which to fight for his aims and put them across. The governing circles and the higher strata of the political and economic bourgeoisie are brought into his nets by the strings of Freemasonry, and never need to suspect what is happening.” He sent Freemasons to concentration camps in an attempt to exterminate them. But wait: Hitler made the Mary Magdalene cult gesture and loaded himself up with Templar symbols and yet opposed the Templars’ “direct” descendants, the Freemasons? I hope you can see that applying Wolter’s own logic ties history into insoluble knots, even while both Hitler and Wolter agree that Freemasons rule the world in secret, in pursuit of an occult ideology. And what did we read in Scott Wolter’s Akhenaten to the Founding Fathers? Wolter tells us that academics cannot be trusted because they are blinded by ideological extremism but that a Nazi collaborator searching for swastikas and Aryans in the Americas was simply a great scientist who did solid research, whose “politics are irrelevant and unimportant” and, indeed, “afforded” him an unparalleled “opportunity” to find truth. Wolter also expresses joy at the idea of pre-Columbian white Aryans being found throughout the Americas, just as Hitler sent archaeologists everywhere from Tibet to Iceland to find Arya artifacts. Heinrich Himmler summed up Hitler’s archaeology policy:

The one and only thing that matters to us, and the thing these people [archaeologists] are paid for by the State, is to have ideas of history that strengthen our people in their necessary national pride. In all this troublesome business we are only interested in one thing—to project into the dim and distant past the picture of our nation as we envision for the future.

In Akhenaten to the Founding Fathers, Wolter similarly explained that his historical investigations into “sacred feminine” dualism are intended to lay the groundwork for a future transformation of American society along the lines of his own ideological and religious beliefs: “…if we humans as a species are going to make it on this planet, some things have got to change. […] I believe that once we know what really happened in the past, only then can we move forward intelligently and with optimism into the future.”

Obviously, Scott Wolter is no Nazi. What I hoped I showed here is that using Scott Wolter’s own historical methodology, anyone can be connected to anything with equally convincing “evidence”—which is to say, not at all convincing. I hope, too, that this shows one of the problems with Wolter’s fact-free speculation: it is close kin to the Victorian hate-filled stew of pseudoscience that gave rise to Nazism and kindred beliefs. You can dress it up in “sacred feminine” New Age rhetoric, but at its core it is a reactionary ideology tied to recreating the past to justify one’s own culture and ideology.

Or it makes Spock part of the conspiracy: Leonard Nimoy was raised Jewish, and took the Vulcan salute from the Orthodox rabbi hand signal for the letter shin -- ש. The rabbi would do the Vulcan salute with both hands touching the thumbs together to make the letter, and it was meant to represent 'Shaddai" (almighty).

Plus that Vulcan salute is almost the opposite of the Wolter M, with the two middle fingers spread instead of joined. That can't be a coincidence.

I suggest there's more to be uncovered in the Trek archives that only a cement engineer could disclose; the millions of Trekkies are clearly brainwashed by the series by dint of the fact that they've always failed to see what's right in front of them.

C'mon, Gorn? Lizard people. The Andorians have horns like Moses. And the way Kirk got around is obviously symbolic of our ancient Aryan ancestors colonizing the frontier with their genes (even though Shatner's also Jewish -- more conspiratorial layers).

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Shane Sullivan

10/13/2013 10:36:06 am

"Plus that Vulcan salute is almost the opposite of the Wolter M, with the two middle fingers spread instead of joined. That can't be a coincidence."

I know, man, I know, that's what I'm saying! He's gotta be with the resistence! ...

Wait a second...

Gorn...Lizard people...

The Vulcan salute is in the shape of a "V"...the name of the miniseries that inspired David Icke's lizard people!

My God, Spock's no freedom fighter, he's an iguana!

The Other J.

10/13/2013 08:44:00 am

Jason said:

"This, of course, runs us up against more than one contradiction. First and most obviously, if the U.S. and Canada are run by the conspiracy, but so too is Hitler a member, why then did the two sides fight against each other in World War II? Was there a higher order conspiracy? A civil war in the sacred feminine movement? Once you open that door, it’s turtles all the way down."

There actually is a line of conspiratorial thought that argues this very thing. The argument goes something like the same interests are at the top of most nation-states in conflict with each other, and they orchestrate wars because the conflict benefits those interests at the top -- usually by keeping common people from getting together and feeling the love, which somehow would threaten the power of those at the top. It's sort of a grand, global version of western mining concerns in Africa funding both sides of a civil war, or the U.S. publicly supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war while feeding Iran guns through Ollie North's back channels.

The nice thing about such a worldview is that the lack of evidence feeds the belief in the controlling interest's sheer diabolic power -- they're so good they can hide on a global scale, and any conflict is just the visual effects of their infection. So the U.S., Canada and Germany could all be in conflict with each other, because no matter who wins or loses, the conflict itself solidifies Templar interests on both sides of the Atlantic, whatever those might be.

I don't pretend to get all of this, because as soon as you ask 'how' or 'why,' you get into meaningless platitudes like "the conflict itself solidifies Templar interests on both sides of the Atlantic."

All joking aside, why do I feel like we're just feeding Wolter new avenues to "explore"?

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Shane C

10/13/2013 12:02:03 pm

I thought the Iron Cross was a "Cross pattée" (which I believe was the style used by the Knights Templar, though thinner than the Prussian version). The Maltese cross, if I recall, has V-shaped indentations on the sides and was used by the Knights of St. John( Knights Hospitaller). Minor issue.

It is in fact a Cross pattée. However, Wolter blends them all together as "Maltese" crosses, so I wasn't being too picky. Plus I was kind of lazy and didn't want to get the special character for the accent on the first e.

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Shane C

10/13/2013 12:38:54 pm

I guess it's too much to ask of Wolter for him to tell the difference between crosses and the knightly orders they are associated with.

Varika

10/13/2013 12:17:49 pm

Okay, I will be SLIGHTLY fair and admit that my hands do NOT actually fall "naturally" into an M shape at any point. I've tried and tried and tried, and I have to MAKE myself do it. This may be true of Scott Wolter, as well. Unlike him, though, I am capable of understanding that other people are not the same as I am physically in the small details as well as the large, and therefore any number of people may have hands that DO fall in that pose naturally. How different is that from me being able to roll my tongue onto a tube and my cousin not, after all?

Even if one assumed that it had to be deliberate, though, it's a pretty far cry from "M with hand" to "Mary Magdalen" without any net to catch you when you fall.

It's probably a natural variation. On my hands the space between the middle and ring fingers is significantly smaller than between the ring and pinky or the middle and index fingers. It actually takes me effort to separate the middle and ring fingers when extending my hand. I assume that like most human measurements the bone structure varies and some people's hands have wider spaced fingers than others.

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Varika

10/13/2013 02:02:45 pm

Mine fall about equally spaced no matter what I do, and making the "m" shape with curved fingers actually makes me have tremors in my fingers.

My only nod to being fair is, if Wolter's hands do the same thing as mine, and he didn't bother to do the same search as The Other J. did (which is a SAFE ASSUMPTION), I could sort of see how he might think it was a deliberate pose rather than a normal variation of hands. Particularly given that his expressed viewpoint has been "If *I* can't do it/think of it, NOBODY can."

The other part was only expressing that if we were actually seeing something that had to be deliberate--say, three fingers folded over the thumb and the pinky extended; given the way tendons work, that's a deliberate action rather than a natural pose on just about EVERYONE--there was no way to definitively say that such a sign meant "Mary Magdalen" and not, say, "I am a member of the Bloody Knives gang" or "I love you Mom."

The Other J.

10/13/2013 12:34:52 pm

One way to check this would be to observe photos of people who are in a relatively relaxed position, and see if their hands naturally make the M shape.

I did a quick google image search for "sitting relaxed" and saw a few M hands. But maybe that's because Shutterstock is part of the conspiracy, I don't know.

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Thorne

10/14/2013 03:10:57 am

Interesting! My hands, like yours, also do not form the M when relaxed. And, also like you, I can roll my tongue into a tube! The connection is obvious, then. Damned if I know what it means, but it's obvious!

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Varika

10/14/2013 10:20:35 am

OBVIOUSLY, then, we are part lizard people from Alpha Draconis! Score, ruling elite~

Harry

10/14/2013 02:16:27 am

Excellent job, Jason.

I suppose that Wolter (if he doesn't just go with the conspiracy theory described by The Other J) could argue that Hitler disagreed with the ideology of other Holy Bloodline conspirators and wanted to appropriate the power of the Bloodline to himself as part of his effort to accumulate power. Hence, his antipathy to Jews and freemasons. (No, I don't buy it either.)

Wolter might not be a Nazi sympathizer, but I suspect that there is a strain of racism, conscious or not, running through his theories. He apparently finds it difficult to believe that American Indians can develop their own cultures independent of European influence, which is why he finds de Mahieu's theories so congenial.

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Paul Cargile

10/14/2013 03:40:41 am

Egads! All the (fictional) women I've sketched with their hand on their hips are forming the Magdalene M, and I wasn't even aware I of it.

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Joe

10/16/2013 09:38:30 am

Sad, in a way. The first episode or two of America Unearthed I found Wolter kind of interesting. Now, I'm becoming increasingly convinced he's crazy.

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titus pullo

10/16/2013 12:37:27 pm

Actually it is the secret sign of central bankers..the scourge of europe funding wars and economic busts..I think Bernanke uses it when he meets with Goldman Sachs..

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TOBIAS JONES

4/13/2015 06:30:55 am

The hand is not a natural position. try doing it. it is hard and you have to concentrate. It is the blood line of jesus and he and mary magdalene did have a child. they have proved about everything.

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Alan Abramowtz

7/6/2015 06:10:14 pm

I don't see how Hitler using the M hand gesture disqualifies the whole concept.

Wanted to return to Jason's blog and explain to his readers about Scott Wolters "M" symbol fallacy! This symbol is found on thousands of relics dating to the 18th century! Everyday, I find dozens just on American engravings I study. The "M" Symbol is and "E" for the symbolism of St. John! Also its the ancient symbol in latin for God, not Mary! The Templar history Scott Wolter knows nothing about is their marriage into the KNIGHTS OF MALTA of the Knights of ST. John, this is their symbol! Scott Walter refused to even address this on his blog site! The Sinclair's and several other high ranking royal Scottish families, DIRECTLY MARRIED Children of Lord Sandillands, the COMMANDER of the KNIGHTS OF MALTA and was part of the Sinclair Royal House hold members WHICH IS DOCUMENTED! This is retarded how long this guys weak research can still be promoted on TV networks! You want to see some real history truth on the Templar Families who made the US Great Seals! Go to americanrelichysteries.wordpress,com and see how many "E"S you can find on the relics on everything present, you will find many....

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.